Ralph Waldo Emerson Archives

Illustration of woman holding her palm toward the viewer with her face obscured by her hand.

Literary intellectuals investigate the power imagination gives us to pose unending questions about our world—viewing religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.

Essays Philosophy

The Opposable Thumb at the End of the Imagination

August 17, 2023August 17, 2023 21 min read Rick Joines Henry David Thoreau, Pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, Wallace Stevens

Literary intellectuals investigate the power imagination gives us to pose unending questions about our world—viewing religion, philosophy, and science as literary genres full of metaphors.

Two people stand opposite of each other where two split walls of different stone designs almost meet in the middle.

Poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. For them, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.

Essays Philosophy

On the Something There Is

April 17, 2023April 23, 2023 17 min read Rick Joines Henry David Thoreau, Pragmatism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Rorty, Robert Frost, William James

Poets, like pragmatists, possess a unique ability to sit with uncertainties and doubts. For them, neither walls nor metaphors are ever complete.

Loneliness in Nature and Threshold Places Erraticus Emerson Thoreau

(Derek Parsons)

Essays Philosophy

Alone in One of Nature’s Threshold Places

July 1, 2020April 28, 2021 10 min read Derek Parsons Essential Reading, Henry David Thoreau, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romanticism, Transcendence

The most fortifying experiences in nature are often found in lonely, transitional zones. But what is the reality of these threshold places?

While Art Unites Beauty Transcends Erraticus

(Eric Terrade)

Essays Philosophy

While Art Unites, Beauty Transcends

October 10, 2019August 30, 2020 8 min read Willis Renuart Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendence

The failure to distinguish between art and beauty has caused much confusion. Art and beauty have two different but overlapping trajectories–one toward union and the other toward transcendent reality.

(Ibrahim Rifath)

Essays Philosophy

Wanderlust Is a Vice, Not a Virtue

April 15, 2019June 1, 2020 12 min read Christopher Porzenheim Ancient Wisdom, Essential Reading, Nostalgia, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stoicism

Critiques of wanderlust by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Stoics have far-reaching consequences for our ability to lead meaningful lives.